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Blixkrieg

The most tasteless passage in last week's State of the Union Message came about half an hour into the speech, as President Bush was enumerating his Administration's successes against Al Qaeda. Three thousand suspected terrorists have been arrested, he said. “And many others have met a different fate,” he went on. “Let's put it this way: they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.” Talk about smoking guns. You could almost see the President blowing across the upturned barrel of his Colt .45.

This was not the first Clint Eastwood moment in the history of the modern Presidency. “Go ahead—make my day,” Ronald Reagan said, back in 1985. “Read my lips,” added his Vice-President, George H. W. Bush, in accepting the Republican Presidential nomination in 1988. But they were merely promising to veto tax bills. Their bravado came with a twinkle. Bush the younger was talking about extrajudicial killings.

Under certain conditions—when the targets are known terrorists, arrest is not a practical option, and the risk to innocent civilians is small—such killings can be preferable to permitting escape. But for the President to boast of them so flippantly was not exactly an example of the moral clarity that is supposed to be his specialty. “They are no longer a problem.” This sounded less like Reagan or Bush the elder than like—Well, let's put it this way. In a chilling account of Saddam Hussein's cruelties in the Times a couple of days before the speech, John F. Burns identified one of the dictator's favorite maxims: “If there is a person, then there is a problem. If there is no person, then there is no problem.”

The President's swagger is the sort of thing that Europeans, especially “old” Europeans, have in mind when they grumble that our President is a callow cowboy. But the difficulty goes beyond the personality of George W. Bush. One cannot spend time in any of the other developed democracies without being struck by the damage the Administration's wise-guy unilateralism has done, not only on the issue of Iraq but also on strategically marginal topics like the Kyoto environmental agreement, family planning, and the International Criminal Court. Everyone expected this pattern to change after the attacks of September 11, 2001. It didn't. The opportunity presented by Europe's instinctive solidarity—epitomized by NATO's decision to invoke, for the first time ever, the provision of its charter declaring that an attack against one is an attack against all—has been wasted. It's only natural that Europe, absorbed in creating a continental order based on nonviolent shared sovereignty, and the United States, whose unmatched military power confers unmatched responsibility, should view the world differently. Some degree of American unilateralism is inescapable. But this Administration seldom bothers to observe the minimal decencies. Europeans remain proud of their participation in Afghanistan (just last week, Norwegian F-16s saw action in a battle against a holdout pro-Taliban warlord), but they have been steadily pushed toward seeing the struggle against terrorism as America's war, not theirs.

In the days after Bush's speech there was much discussion of whether he had “made the case.” But the real question, whatever Bush says, is whether there is a case. In that connection, last week's most important speech was not the State of the Union. It was the report the day before by Hans Blix, of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), and it was not the whitewash that conservative commentators had preëmptively decided it would be. In its drip-drip-drip way, the Blix report is completely consistent with the view that the Iraqi regime is coöperating only to the minimal extent required to avoid immediate attack and that it has no intention of giving up its murderous ambitions. The closest Blix gets to a conclusion—and it may be close enough—comes in this sentence: “Unlike South Africa, which decided on its own to eliminate its nuclear weapons and welcomed inspection as a means of creating confidence in its disarmament, Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance—not even today—of the disarmament which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and to live in peace.” To put what Blix is saying another way, if the Iraqi regime continues to resist disarmament then it must expect war. Even if one distrusts the Bush Administration, it's hard to disagree.

It's also hard to disagree with the case for leaving the inspection regime in place for a time. As Blix reports, in two months UNMOVIC has built its staff in Iraq from zero to two hundred and sixty. It has eight helicopters and will soon have the use of unmanned aerial surveillance vehicles and U-2 aircraft. The chances of a conclusive discovery, or of a conclusive Iraqi effort to thwart one, are growing. A little more time, especially if it comes with a Security Council resolution unambiguously authorizing force if Iraq does not unambiguously disarm, would mitigate the damage to allied unity, lessen the (largely self-created) isolation of the United States, and create a basis for international burden-sharing in the rebuilding of Iraq.

The debate over Iraq has focussed almost entirely on the before and the after. What has hardly been discussed is the war itself. The Administration's hawks and the op-ed falconers say it will be short and relatively bloodless. But wars seldom unfold as planned. Twelve years ago, Saddam's forces were massed in an empty desert. Today, though weaker, they are scattered throughout a thickly populated country the size of Germany. A war plan leaked last week to David Martin, of CBS News, calls for up to eight hundred cruise-missile strikes during the first two days—twice as many as during the forty days of the Gulf War. Martin quotes a Pentagon official as saying, “There will not be a safe place in Baghdad.” The plan is called “Shock and Awe,” and its goal is “the psychological destruction of the enemy's will to fight.” Or perhaps that is merely the goal of the leak. But any campaign is likely to begin with bombs over Baghdad. Many people will die. And if Iraq's response to the bombing of its capital city is more like London's in 1940 or Hanoi's in 1966 than like Belgrade's in 1999—if its Army's will is stiffened rather than broken—then no one can say how much suffering and death might follow.

The other day, Secretary of State Colin Powell was reminded that his boss is in bed by ten and sleeps like a baby. Powell reportedly replied, “I sleep like a baby, too—every two hours I wake up screaming.” The President's serenity is more worrying than the General's anxiety is comforting. And the storm approaches.

Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker. He regularly blogs about politics.